I have something to confess. I've been putting off letting you know, but I feel that I really can't hide this from you, my loyal reader, any longer. A couple of months ago I was appointed a member of the Premier Awards Team on ePhotozine. There, I've said it... actually my other reader already knew, sorry I didn't mean to keep it from you! The poacher has turned gamekeeper; the photographer become judge. I know you're feeling disappointed in me, though you're trying hard to keep it from your face. I know that I said that I didn't approve of competition in photography, that vying for approval really isn't the point. I know that I said that competition leads to smaller variation in imagery submitted rather than a flowering of creativity. I know all of this but I thought that maybe I could, in some small way, influence which images were chosen for awards and hopefully broaden the spectrum a little of what is considered worthy. (I'll let you know how this mission proceeds...)
Anyway, having crossed the Rubicon, I'd like to share a couple of my experiences in the land of judges - which actually seems to actually more about being judged than judging.
As a member of the judging team I was granted an e2 Portfolio and started to upload some of my images. I wasn't expecting to set the ePhotozine world alight but thought that it would be good to show my images as they represent a quite different take on landscape from the vast majority of work posted on the site. I hoped that the possibility for other members to comment on the photographs might spark a bit of debate about different approaches to landscape photography and what constitutes an interesting landscape image.
So far the comments posted on my work have been outrageously flattering; "Wow", "Amazing", "Lovely colours.", "Works really well.", "Great shot.", and "Superb capture." At first sight this seems lovely; "Really, my images!? I'm blushing!" Well no, as it turns out, not just mine. It seems that almost every image posted attracts similar comments from at least one or two people. We all welcome the approval of our peers so isn't this just an uncomplicated boost for the ego? I don't think that it's a simple as that. Well intentioned as they undoubtedly are I find these comments quite depressingly banal. The writers' reactions seem honest but rather than exhibiting any critical thought they are simply instantaneous, visceral responses. I realise that for a whole host of reasons I'm almost certainly expecting too much: I may be posting in the wrong way as I've not flagged my images as needing a critique; or people might only wish for a pat on the back with regard to their own images and be uneasy of offering more to other members (something that we've discussed here before); or people may be even less willing to give critical comments on images posted by a member of the Premier Awards Team.
Or it may simply be that people don't know what to say. I don't think that this is just a question of a desire to stick to polite platitudes, rather it's a question of not knowing how to analyse images beyond whether or not they comply with a range of templates. It might simply be that "stick to the rules" equals good, "break the rules" equals don't know what to say. One comment on my image of Bleikoya, an image that it could be said doesn't obey the rules, was really quite bizarre. The poster asked whether it was deliberate that I had placed the main elements on the central axis of the frame. In my mind's eye I imagined how I might have arrived at this composition if not deliberately and saw myself spinning the camera around on the tripod, "Round and round she goes, where she stops nobody knows..."
Despite my frustrations I have to admit that there's an addictive quality to the comments process. When I load a new image onto my portfolio I find myself checking the site two or three times a day whether new comments have been posted. Sad or what? Maybe belonging to a community is the real point, feeling a member of the tribe of photographers. It's very easy to be isolated as a landscape or wildlife photographer, especially as we tend to avoid other people when we're making images!
I received one comment on the image of Loch Tulla, which accompanies this post, that I found quite fascinating;
"Well my first reaction is seriously WOW! great photo, great colours, great abstract then my eye followed the rift in the ice up and up and came to funny line across the top and the even funnier tiny bit of sky at the top RHS. I really would (a) crop the bit of horizon off - and clone out the line. I know it's probably a pressure ridge or some other natural feature but distracting in an otherwise fantastic photo."
Well, my first reaction was I deliberately chose to to leave the line in so why would crop or clone it out? I like the discord that the line brings to the image. I had considered excluding it from the frame when I composed the shot and decided not to as I felt that without it the image becomes a little to easy, too perfect in fact . The offending line obviously made the commentator feel uneasy. But perhaps landscape images, whether vista or abstract, shouldn't always be easy to look at. Perhaps sometimes they should challenge or unsettle. It seems to me that the notion of too perfect is quite interesting in an age when any photographic image is open to quick and radical alteration.
A couple of points arising from the comment seem particularly interesting: firstly the casual assumption that making a quite major alteration to the composition by cloning would be fine (either with me or any other photographer. And secondly I wonder whether this is symptomatic of a widespread casual approach to the acquisition of images. I have quite deliberately used the word casual here, not least because I, like many other photographers, make very deliberate choices when creating my images. But rather than my more rigorous (old fashioned?) approach to creating single images it seems to me that there is a current trend amongst a large number of photographers for making "files" rather than images. These will then be titivated, either as solo pieces or as part of some composite image, to a state of near perfection.
I want to look at the "casuals" in a bit more detail...
Firstly, for me, as an adherent of the old school, the thought of making such a large alteration to an image is anathema. This honestly isn't a question of do as I say and not as I do. Of course I manipulate scans of my images; I spot out dust, tweak curves and the histogram, sharpen and make local changes in contrast and density. Manipulation isn't the issue, it would always be present in any photograph even if you sought not to manipulate. The issue is one of intent.
I strive to get it right in camera and if I can't do that I will walk away. If I had felt that the line was a problem I would probably have either changed the composition to exclude it or decided to abandon the image altogether. It wouldn't have occurred to me to think about "mending" it afterwards by digitally manipulating it in this way. Now I realise that in a very basic technical sense there's not much difference between changing the density/colour of a pixel to give me more shadow detail or render it more realistically (i.e. as I saw it!) and changing the density/colour of a pixel to entirely remove something. The vital difference is, as I wrote above, one of intent. In the first instance one seeks to stay within the bounds of what was originally captured, in the second one seeks to move beyond the original capture, it is merely the starting point. You might say that I'm just creating a rod for my own back, why not loosen up? What I'm trying to do in my photography is to create correspondences to the world around me through my images. I'm not trying to create something entirely different from my imagination. I would have been a painter or sculptor if I'd wanted to do that.
I'm indebted to my other reader, Paul Marsch, for (coincidentally) sending me this rather apposite quote from the editorial of Photoicon magazine;
"... whilst the older generation of photographers are working primarily within the intellectual and technical considerations established in the mid-20th century - and represented in the work of Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson - the new breed of photographer is concerned with the manipulation of the image and the virtuosity of digital processes"
Mike von Joel
Well apart from making me feel very old it occurs to me that this current photographic trend is, despite the cutting edge technology used and contrary to what this quote suggests, nothing new at all. The key point for me is not about digital technologies virtuosity, that's a given, but to what end that virtuosity is applied. Does its use produce an image that is more evocative or merely more technically perfect? Mike von Joel's editorial continues;
"Now, the onus is on fabricating the image from the start, where one or more photographs are merely ingredients in a whole theatre of activity to create the final statement."
What he's describing is in a sense a return to the very early days of the medium. It's a return to Pictorialism's painterly approach and the even earlier montage work of photographers like Henry Peach Robinson It also contains echoes of very old argument about the intrinsic nature of photographic art; can a straight photograph be art or does photographic art only become possible through gross manipulation? In other words, can a largely un-manipulated image transcend its origins?
What Robinson and the later Pictorialist photographers had in common was an aching desire to achieve recognition for photography as art with a capital 'A'. Both sought to do this by aping painting's aesthetics, including the use of brush strokes and impressionistic soft focus. What they singly avoided was an exploration of what might be achieved using photography's inherent verisimilitude. Strand, Stieglitz and others later argued convincingly that the essence of photography is its apparent objectivity which still allows for subjective interpretation. It is perhaps interesting to note that whereas the Pictorialists sought photography's validation as Art by using painterly techniques, present day photographic montage work seems to have almost a diametrically opposed agenda. Current manipulators seem to either not care about their work's possible status as art or to feel confident that their work already is art. In either case they are invariably seeking to prove the 'truth' of their concept by using photography's veneer of veracity. There's an obvious incongruity here as these composite images represent a patently unreal reality – I know, I know, all photographs are unreal. But it's a question of degree.
My second 'casual' – a relaxed attitude to the acquisition of photographic material – follows on from the habit of viewing photography as a plastic medium. As I've already noted, this approach views single photographs not as completed works but as components; reality is something to be sculpted rather than merely 'recorded'. Now whilst not every digital photographer uses photography in this way modern photo editing software is almost universally employed. Images straight out of the camera are very rarely satisfactory. And when shooting RAW it would be impossible not to use software if one wanted to "publish" the image either on the web or as a print. The expectation has therefore grown that a degree of manipulation is essential. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that photographers have given up a desire for perfection, merely that they have shifted the point at which they expect to achieve this from in the camera to post production. This is in many ways identical to the stance of monochrome workers. Adams famously wrote that the "negative is the score and the print the performance." It could be argued that this approach is the norm and that working with transparencies, as I do, where it pays to get everything absolutely right in camera is abnormal. Perhaps it leads to an over-rigorous approach which might stifle spontaneity. What am I saying?! Using a 5x4 is hardly the best way to make spontaneous images! My worry is that some digital photographers are too relaxed about seizing the moment, always taking the view that any faults can be "fixed" in the editing process. Call me anal but that's just a little too laissez-faire for me.
It also occurs to me that for a proportion of photographers, at a basic level, reality simply isn't good enough; it's not interesting enough or malleable enough or perfect enough. I kind of wonder why they're photographers and not working in some other medium. As I wrote earlier, I don't have any problem with manipulation per se. However it seems obvious to me that it's much more of a challenge to deliberately move beyond mere description with a 'straight' photograph than it is to do so by distorting the raw photographic material into something else. Assembling images out of a variety of photographic parts, for instance, no doubt takes imagination for the underlying concept and a high degree of skill if it is to be achieved convincingly. But it is much harder to produce an image that is simply written by the light reflected from the subject and make it seem like something much more than, or even quite different from, what is described. Of course difficulty on it's own isn't a particularly good measure of artistic merit. It's perfectly possible for something to be very hard to do but not creatively worthwhile! For me the value in straight photography is that it offers the possibility of a true exploration of photographic space. Gary Winogrand said that, "Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed." There's nothing inherently wrong with montages but, as far as I'm concerned, they're not pure photography. Such gross manipulation simply doesn't reflect the most interesting aspect of photography, namely its incredible ability to transcend literal description.
And what of the notion of too perfect? I wonder if an unnecessary striving for perfection and "prettification" isn't just a symptom of a wider cultural trend. We like images of our fashion models (who, it must be said are already exceptional) to be "airbrushed" and morphed to fit an ideal; we want our fruit in the supermarket to be blemish free and of perfect shape; we also want (or the E.U. allegedly does) our cucumbers to be straight and of a uniform length. But do landscape images always have to be both pretty and flawless? Might not more be said by them if they weren't. Obviously I'm not advocating publishing any old rubbish. As I wrote earlier, attention to detail is vital. What I'm suggesting is that one man's imperfections in art might actually be another's evocation.
And finally, to return to where this all began, in my new found role evaluating the work of other photographers I certainly intend to offer them the respect of assuming that they meant to do something and only then deciding whether it works for me.
